Friday, February 25, 2011

Something hilarious about something serious

Today I was searching YouTube to see if one of the top astrologers, Liz Greene, has any videos there. My desire to see her lecture was quickly deflected when I saw that she was mentioned in the tag of a conspiracy video. Some things you just have to see in order to believe that someone could come up with that.

I've been reading Cosmos and Psyche, historian Richard Tarnas' book that tracks the synchronicity between historical events and the cycles of the outer planets. So I wasn't surprised when they mentioned the Saturn-Pluto opposition taking place in 2001. Of course, in the video, they do not mention that squares, oppositions and conjunctions of the Saturn-Pluto cycle have gone along with a vast number of similar moments in history. Among these are the Thermirodian Reaction during the French Revolution when a very conservative counterpoint to the anarchistic and liberal values espoused earlier in the revolution resulted in the decapitations of a great number of revolutionaries including Georges Danton (who had been partly in charge of earlier revolutionary governing bodies) and Olympe de Gouges (who wrote Declaration on the Rights of Women), the early 1930s when Nazism came to ascendancy in Germany, the mid/late 1940s during which the atomic bomb was dropped twice on Japan, the Cold War started and George Orwell wrote 1984, around 1984 when the Cold War was at its tensest point, and even back in C.E. 235 when the Roman Empire was subjected to military anarchy after the emperor was slain by his own troops and the economy was reduced to barter due to the continuous debasing of the currency that had gone on previously. So if the "astrology seems correct because of Illuminati conspiracy" hypothesis is correct, these guys have a lot more explaining to do.

Having studied and practiced the techniques of magic for some time, I have been continually surprised at how well the darn stuff works. My experience also makes me quite aware of how misleading the interpretation of the axiom "As above, so below," given in the video is. First of all, if you understand anything about magic you know that magical axia such as this one are meant to be interpreted at a variety levels simultaneously, rather than taken in the most vulgar and literal sense. So 'above' means not just the stars (though it does mean them), it also means above the neck (in the head), in supernal orders beyond the material world such as the Platonic world of forms, and in the world that's creating this one by the process of simulation. Similarly, 'below' obviously means a variety of things besides 'below the stars', and refers not only to the world of material events but to the body (below the head), in simulations created in this world, and even to 'hell' if you choose to imagine one, or the unconscious. The axiom is not an admonition or an imperative, it is a statement of fact. To distill it a bit, the idea is that the same basic order permeates all things. This principle is the one by which myths and stories are relevant to our own lives, and the principle by which we may come to know the mind of God.

A fundamental difference between thinking magically and thinking in terms of conspiracy is the conspiracist's tendency to see the handiwork of their favorite demons where the magician sees synchronicity. The magician assumes that everything that attention can be directed to exists, at least after a fashion (and this is balanced by the notion that matter is just another part of the Great Illusion), while the conspiracist's assumption is somewhat harder to grasp - at the moment to me it resembles the religionist's assumption that what explains more in one fell swoop is more real than what explains less. Of course I am already biased to include holding political positions in the category of religious activity. This does not mean that I eschew them, but I prefer not to let them utterly rule my being, either.

Now, with all this said, the veracity or falsehood of the various more realistic ideas about what happened on September 11, 2001 has been left untouched. If you believe the explanation that Islamic extremism caused men to fly planes into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, which caused the Twin Towers and WTC-7 to collapse, then are as free to find archetypal pertinence in the Saturn-Pluto opposition of that period as you are if you believe that the buildings in New York were demolished (explaining the other explosion heard before the towers started to fall). In fact, if your version of reality involves a conspiratorial organization with beliefs leaning toward astrology, the possibility that these conspirators used electional astrology to plan the timing of your deception is wide open. I believe people should do their own research on Rorschach events like 9/11 and figure out for themselves what seems most plausible, so I will not come down on either side in this blog.

However, to suggest that "As above, so below," is an imperative to orchestrate the mimicking of celestial events on the Earth simply for its own sake is quite preposterous, unless you want to attribute things like the widespread appeal of psychoanalysis and the start of quantum mechanics to the activities of the Illuminati worshiping the aspect of Jupiter and Uranus. Rather than being a direct indicator of what a magician should do (i.e. make the below resemble the above), it's a statement about how things are, so the magician can figure out for himself what to do.

Glad you managed to pull through, Marcus. I'll try to put more line breaks in my next one, I know that makes it a lot easier for people to read. And I'll try to split up the really long sentences, too. Richard Tarnas' writing style seems to be contagious...